English Site ADDING Spanish Version
 

I have an English wordpress site that I'd like to duplicate and translate in Spanish...does anyone recommend using a subdomain (espanol.xyz.com) or something like a .com/es/ format? I'm also interested in any SEO issues that might arise and want to keep SEO in mind while building this segment of the site. Any other tips or things to think of?

Haytem,

I am currently seeking information on the same subject. This morning I posted a few related questions on this forum. Tonight I found part of the information I needed in a WordPress Codex titled "Multilingual WordPress". It gives the pros and cons of various approaches to bilingual or multilingual sites. Using a subdomain such as esp.xyz.com and using a pattern such as .com/es/ are listed there.

From what I can understand, any of these two scenarios you mentioned in your post would be the simplest way to set up a bilingual or trilingual site. The only drawback mentionned on that WordPress codex is the maintaining of two or more individual sites.

The advantage I see is that your Spanish and your English content would both be in a stand alone site, with their own database. Plugins can be experimented with and used to allow users to switch from a language to the other.

I have now converted my css-html site over to WordPress. A friend from another forum advised me against multisite and suggested sticking to a single site with one domain. This advice was aligned to the size and purpose of my site.

Now that I have set up my site in this way, I am glad I did. There is a lot of configuration and adjustment work that must be done in general to the site. With multiple sites, you have to maintain as many sites as you have languages.

My concern was that plugins would compromise the stability of my site. It did not so far. I am using a plugin called Polylang. Its functionalities allow me to reproduce the way my old site worked, but also offer nice additions that make it easy to work with it.

if your using wordpress then use multi language theme so you can easily convert it.